Big Five Challenges on Setting up Technical Monitoring in SM 7.1 SP10

We have successfully completed the technical monitoring setup project with one of the client last week; It went go live as planned. And this was my last project in Singapore. We celebrated success party with the client end as well as my farewell party with my peers and friends.  We were very pleased to have one of my manager from previous company on the party; he is one of my well-wisher too.  We had a wonderful conversation with various things. One of the catchy questions from him was about Technical monitoring. The question from him was very interesting; it was that, what are the challenges from your end for small and easy projects like technical monitoring.  Any project whether it was small or big always  has challenges, only critical level may differ.

Like my manager, might be many of you had the similar doubt, hence thought of sharing with you all my experience on setting up technical monitoring.

I Clear Draft of Requirement

The major work in the technical monitoring would be on defining Template strategy. Though SAP had given the standard templates for setting up monitoring, we need to customize it anyway. It is always good practice to create custom template based on the standard one and work only on the custom templates. Due to this, We have to define the clear plan on how many custom templates been created, and how could it be assigned to systems. More over Customization is not meant of custom alerts or metrics, even if you are changing the notifications, priority, severity, threshold all would be considered as customization. We need to be very clear on what are the metrics are need to be monitored, what are the metrics are need to trigger the alert, what is the mode of sending notification whether Email or third party, who are my recipients. This all needs to be clear in our hand, before start the setup.

You can get the available metrics and alert with the detail description from the SAP Standard template overview tab under solman_setup -> Technical monitoring -> Step 4 Template maintenance

You can use this excel file for finalising your entire requirement on beforehand.

II Custom Alerts

There are lots of special features available in Technical monitoring like alerts grouping, metric group, and variant settings. Analyse the entire standard and change individual setting accordingly on your need. If you are going to create any custom metrics based on CCMS MTEs, make sure you have created the data collector also on Z space. This could be very helpful during the time of tracking. The document which we followed was here, How to Create Custom CCMS Metrics.

Please see the appendix of the document on page number 27 for custom data collectors creation.

Also note that, every time you change the metrics you need to reactivate the template, then only all the changes get activated. If you created more templates and assigned to lots of systems this deactivation and activation takes lots of time, hence make sure all custom alerts are finalized and created before. If you have test systems would be very nice that you can test before active in production.

III Fulfilling Pre requistie

Almost all the solution manager scenarios setup can be started only after the pre requisite met. The major issue in technical monitoring would be data collectors. As you all know that technical monitoring is completely different from the earlier system monitoring which is CCMS based. Technical monitoring collectors have lots of collectors, like RFCs, Diagnostic agents, SAP Host agents etc.

Most of the pre requisites are checking this collector’s connectivity and status. The major pre requisites are complieting the entire solman_Setup -> system preparation, basic configuration, and Managed system configuration.  Hence we need to make sure that all steps are marked green.

The other things which I could consider as pre requisite would be EWA reporting, DIA agent connection, Technical Monitoring content update, ST/PI, SAP Host agent upgrade to latest level.

There are some metrics needs additional parameters needs to be set like NFS Share onitoring, In such case make sure you set the parameter and restarted the system.

IV Troubleshooting

We do have major issues in this area, like most of the Metrics data would not be collected or rated grey or wrongly rated or wrongly define.

The wonderful places helped to overcome most of the major issues are, Content check and compare tool.

Metric Monitor, this helps to identify the range of metrics value variation over period of time.

Data collection check, this is the first place where we can get the cause of the grey monitoring.

And also MAI Tools, this is one of the very powerful transaction code, which almost helped to fix very difficult collection issues, like authorisation and etc. Check out more here, Monitoring and Alerting Infrastructure Analysis Tools – SAP Solution Manager – SAP Libr

V House Keeping

The standard housekeeping from SAP might not be sufficient, if you are having more systems or more administrators and vice versa. Please make sure that you defined the house keeping for alerts as well as the BI store.

For alerts can be defined directly in Technical monitoring setup.

For BI housekeeping, please look at my prior blogs for more clarity here,How Is The Health Of Your SAP Solution Manager BI Content?

The other minor challenges like authorization, maintaining global notifications, integration third party ticketing tool,  work mode management all are significant too.

Hope this blog help out all those who planning for setting up Technical Monitring.